Virtual Surreality

A long weekend in Sydney spend trawling the net, checked out TSS and looked again at JSR-170 (Content Repository). While there started branching off to various other sites, which leads me to the title of this entry.

The good: http://www.jetbrains.com/company/people/Smirnova_Olesya.html. Olesya Smirnova. I like the tool, really like the namesake Vodka, and really really like the biography (her picture ain’t too shabby either, grrrrarrrr).

The bad: JSR-170. Why in the name of all that’s holy do we let the same vendors who write aweful software anywhere near the standards related to that software?

The ugly: BileBlog http://www.jroller.com/page/fate/ Hani Suleiman. Would be easy to take offence if it wasn’t coming from someone involved in writing OpenSymphony. ROFLMAO.

Last night at the SyXPAC, my new colleagues at ThoughtWorks facilitated an XP Game in which we used balloons, cards, numbers and die as props.

Customer interviews, estimation, story cards, iterations, business value, and velocity were the features of the game.

It was a very fun experience and highlighted the fundamentals of planning and implementation.

We had three teams of four participants, with three TW coaches and a couple of TW observers. It was great to have some of the XP core concepts driven through non-development tasks – it made drawing parallels to coding quite easy.

I’ve just cobbled together a little Excel template to help the coaches and facilitators record the results for each team.

I’m predicting this XP Game will become very popular with our clients and agilists in general as it becomes more refined.